Six summers in the past, I walked right into a downtown Chicago lodge room to the sight of Dusty Baker ironing his pants in his boxers and a T-shirt.
Baker was managing the Washington Nationals, and I had stopped by his lodge for an interview in June 2016 about his profession and a budding rivalry with the Chicago Cubs.
After such a painful ending in Chicago 10 years earlier, Baker actually wasn’t fascinated by reliving the previous.
“The Cubs? It’s kind of a faint memory to me, especially when things don’t end the way you want them to end,” he stated. “And the way I was booed at the end. Why would I try to remember that? Every time I walked out on the field I’d get booed. My wife was afraid for me. She didn’t want me to go out by myself, to a bar or anything.”
Baker could have tried to neglect his Chicago days, however those that knew him from that point by no means forgot him — or stopped rooting for him. That’s why it was so inspiring to get up Sunday morning after the Houston Astros gave him his long-sought championship with a Game 6 win over the Philadelphia Phillies and browse all of the tributes to Baker on social media.
“I am SO happy for my friend Dusty Baker,” former Cubs media relations director Sharon Pannozzo wrote on Facebook. “One of the finest human beings I have ever met.”
“You may not like the Astros, but to me, Dusty is a special man,” WBEZ reporter Cheryl Raye-Stout wrote.
It took Baker 3,884 regular-season video games over 25 seasons to turn into a World Series-winning supervisor. The wait was price it.
“The Hall of Fame is waiting for you,” former White Sox supervisor Ozzie Guillén tweeted. “Enjoy every second of it.”
Doug Glanville and lots of different former gamers of Baker chimed in, in addition to dozens of beat writers who lined the supervisor’s groups. Baker is the George Bailey of baseball, the richest man on the town.
It’s not an exaggeration to say he was deposed at 4 stops — coming to bitter endings in San Francisco, Chicago, Cincinnati and Washington earlier than winding up in Houston. He remained pals with lots of the writers who chronicled his demise in these cities, by no means holding it in opposition to them for writing he was on the recent seat and about to be fired.
Looking again on the Tribune’s protection of the Cubs’ 2006 season, we started writing his time was up on the Cubs Convention in January. When first baseman Derrek Lee suffered a season-ending wrist damage in late April, it nearly ended their postseason possibilities, and the one query left was whether or not Baker can be fired by the All-Star break.
It will need to have been robust to take care of, however Baker dealt with it like a professional. This, bear in mind, was a man who went out of his solution to absolve Steve Bartman of blame for the Game 6 loss within the 2003 National League Championship Series after the Cubs fan reached out over the wall and tried to catch a foul ball that left fielder Moises Alou pretended was catchable.
Baker advised us afterward he was extra decided to win in 2004 and wished Bartman to trip shotgun subsequent to him within the victory parade when the Cubs gained all of it. That 2003 Cubs group began an period when Wrigley Field was the place to be. The group bought 572,000 tickets on the primary day of gross sales that winter, and each sport was handled like a playoff sport.
The 2004 season spelled the tip for Baker in Chicago. The preventing between gamers and broadcasters Chip Caray and Steve Stone, in addition to a late-season collapse that dropped the Cubs out of the National League wild-card race within the last week, mixed to make Baker an unpopular determine and a goal for sports-radio callers.
Injuries to Kerry Wood and Mark Prior had been blamed on Baker, who stated he felt like a “fall guy” for the pitchers’ issues.
“Prior and Wood, that’s all I hear about,” he advised me in 2016. “Where was my pitching coach, Larry Rothschild, on this entire equation? People assume I used to be the pitching coach, the every part coach. That was one of many saddest days in my life after they advised me about Mark Prior’s (shoulder damage) after I acquired to spring coaching (in 2004).
“I was like, why did we just find out when we got there in springtime? Then I had to go along with the lie about his Achilles hurt and all that. They were like, ‘We’re trying to protect you.’ I said, ‘Don’t protect me, I’m grown.’ The truth protects. Sooner or later it was going to get exposed.”
Wood at all times defended Baker, and in a 2016 Sports Illustrated story Prior did as nicely.
“(Fans) believe that he overused me in 2003 and blah, blah, blah,” Prior wrote. “Only, here’s the thing: I don’t blame Dusty for what happened to me. I wouldn’t change a single thing that happened during that season — beyond us failing to bring a World Series championship to Chicago, of course. No matter how many pitches I threw, I never asked to come out of a game — doing so would have been unthinkable.”
Baker by no means escaped the blame for the Cubs’ failure to win in his 4 years in Chicago. If Tony La Russa thought he was mistreated by White Sox followers this season, it was nothing like what Baker went by way of the final three years of his four-year stint on the North Side.
The Cubs started spending after Baker left and went to the postseason twice below Lou Piniella. And then Cubs President Crane Kenney threw Baker below the bus on the 2009 Cubs Convention.
“If you think about the team that won in ‘07, does that team win with our former manager?” Kenney advised the gang. “Not a chance.”
Baker was booed each time he was at Wrigley Field when he managed the Reds, and the animosity continued when he wound up in Washington. That stint additionally ended badly, despite Baker’s on-field success.
Then the Astros known as in 2020, on the lookout for somebody to assist take the warmth off gamers concerned within the dishonest scandal.
“I didn’t think I’d get another shot (after the Nationals fired him in 2017), not with age and salary discrimination, which go hand in hand usually,” he advised me final yr. “And there’s at all times some type of racial discrimination, it doesn’t matter what shade you might be. Depends on who’s doing the hiring.
“The way I look at it, God didn’t want me to go home yet. This was the door that was open to me, one that looked like it was impossible to open.”
Once the door was opened, Baker took full benefit — and now he’s a World Series champion at 73.
Could the 2022 Astros have gained with some other supervisor?
Not an opportunity.
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Source: www.bostonherald.com